Category: The Atlasphere

All things Atlasphere can be found here, columns, podcasts, interesting anecdotes, and more.

al Qaeda Web Sites: Good Riddance

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From an article (“Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out“) in the Times Online:

Over the past fortnight Israeli intelligence agents have noticed something distinctly odd happening on the internet. One by one, Al-Qaeda?s affiliated websites have vanished until only a handful remain, write Uzi Mahnaimi and Alex Pell.
Someone has cut the line of communication between the spiritual leaders of international terrorism and their supporters. Since 9/11 the websites have been the main links to disseminate propaganda and information.
The Israelis detect the hand of British intelligence, determined to torpedo the websites after the London attacks of July 7.
The web has become the new battleground of terrorism, permitting a freedom of communication denied to such organisations as the IRA a couple of decades ago.
One global jihad site terminated recently was an inflammatory Pakistani site, www.mojihedun.com, in which a section entitled How to Strike a European City gave full technical instructions. Tens of similar sites, some offering detailed information on how to build and use biological weapons, have also been shut down. However, Islamic sites believed to be ?moderate?, remain.

See the full article for more background. Via Drudge.

'The Abolition of Antitrust' on C-Span2 on Sunday

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Gary Hull, editor of the recently published The Abolition of Antitrust, will discuss the book on C-Span2 Book TV this Sunday at 5:30am EST. According to the program’s announcement, Mr. Hull will be joined by Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute to examine several antitrust cases, including General Electric, Visa/Mastercard, and Kellogg/General Mills.
Here is the publisher’s description for The Abolition of Antitrust:

The Abolition of Antitrust asserts that antitrust laws- on economic, legal, and moral grounds- are bad, and provides convincing evidence supporting argument for their total abolition. Every year, new antitrust prosecutions arise in the U.S. courts, as in the cases against 3M and Visa/MasterCard, as well as a number of ongoing antitrust cases, such as those involving Microsoft and college football’s use of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Gary Hull and the contributing authors show that these cases- as well as the Sherman Antitrust Act itself- are based on an erroneous interpretation of the history of American business, premised on bad economics. They equivocate between economic and political power- the power to produce versus the power to use physical force. For Hull, antitrust prosecutions are based on a horrible moral inversion: that it is acceptable to sacrifice America’s best producers.

Fritz Attaway and Atlas Shrugged on NPR

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

From a story on National Public Radio:

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that movie studios and record labels can sue software companies that allow customers to pirate music and movies online. Fritz Attaway testified on behalf of Hollywood and the music industry. He’s executive vice president for government relations and Washington general counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America.
He’s splitting this summer between the nation’s capital and Jamestown, R.I., with different books for each locale.

And among his preferred books are…

Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, both by Ayn Rand. “The symbolism is about individualism, which is Rand’s theme in all of her books.”

Thanks to Atlasphere member Brian Schwartz for this tip.

FairTax Book is #2 at Amazon (#1 is Harry Potter)

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Neil Boortz’s The FairTax Book (due out August 2nd) has reached the #1 nonfiction slot on Amazon.com — and its overall sales is second only to the new Harry Potter book.
Here’s the description of the book at Amazon, presumably from the back cover:

Wouldn’t you love to abolish the IRS … Keep all the money in your paycheck … Pay taxes on what you spend, not what you earn … And eliminate all the fraud, hassle, and waste of our current system?
Then the FairTax is for you. In the face of the outlandish American tax burden, talk-radio firebrand Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder are leading the charge to phase out our current, unfair system and enact the FairTax Plan — replacing the federal income tax and withholding system with a simple 23 percent retail sales tax. This dramatic revision of the current system, which would eliminate the reviled IRS, has already caught fire in the American heartland, with more than 600,000 taxpayers signing on in support of the plan.
As Boortz and Linder reveal in this first book on the FairTax, this radical but eminently sensible plan would end the annual national nightmare of filing income tax returns, while at the same time enlarging the federal tax base by collecting sales tax from every retail consumer in the country. The FairTax, they argue, would transform the fearsome bureaucracy of the IRS into a more transparent, accountable — and equitable — tax collection system. Endorsed by scores of leading economists — and supported by a huge and growing grassroots movement — the Fair Tax Plan could revolutionize the way America pays for itself.

And here’s an related update from the folks at FairTax.org:

Today and through midnight July 31st, any contribution to FairTax.org for $50.00 or more will include Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder’s new “The FairTax Book.” I ask you to support the FairTax fight by making a donation of $50.00 right now and locking in your copy.
Today, “The FairTax Book,” by Congressman John Linder and talk show host Neal Boortz, has hit #1 on Amazon.com for nonfiction books and #2 in overall book sales. Famous Fox media personality Sean Hannity has even said he thinks the book could go to #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers list.
You and I can’t let this opportunity to spread the FairTax message pass without taking full advantage of it. To have “The FairTax Book” on the New York Times Best Sellers list would be equivalent to millions of dollars in advertising for FairTax. This is money we won’t have to spend if we can get people to buy the book.

If you agree this is a worthwhile cause, please stop by and make a contribution so you can receive a free copy.

Lance Armstrong's Heroism Is a Moral Inspiration

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From Andrew Bernstein, writing for the Ayn Rand Institute:
Athletic victories provide a rare and crucial moral value: the sight of human achievement.
When Lance Armstrong rode through Paris on Sunday, crowning his unprecedented seventh consecutive victory in the grueling Tour de France, he put an exclamation mark on what is more than merely an extraordinary athletic career.
By this time, the entire world knows Armstrong’s story–his remarkable recovery from what was feared to be terminal cancer, his exhausting training program, his legendary endurance, his dauntless determination, his unequalled dominance of cycling?s premier event. Millions around the world properly celebrate him and his lofty accomplishments.
But what explains the enormous interest in Armstrong’s success–or that of any other sports hero? Why do sports fans set such a strong personal stake in the victories of their heroes? After all, little of any practical significance depends on such victories; a seventh Armstrong win won’t get his fans a raise or help send their children to college. Why do sports have such an enormous, enduring appeal in human life?
The answer lies in a rarely recognized aspect of sports: their moral significance. What athletic victories provide is a rare and crucial moral value: the sight of human achievement.
Continue reading “Lance Armstrong's Heroism Is a Moral Inspiration”

Ayn Rand featured in the Museum of the Jewish People

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The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Israel, features Ayn Rand on its online “Who is Who in the Jewish World?”
The web page honors “[a] gallery of famous Jewish personalities, who have left a significant imprint on history” and provides information on “personalities chosen from various fields of historical, cultural, religious, political and scientific life.”
Each week, a person is featured as “Personality of the Week.” Ayn Rand was featured with a fair and accurate entry on her life and achievements:

Ayn Rand (Alissa Rosenbaum)
(1905 – 1982) writer and philosopher
Born in Russia, she studied at the University of Petrograd graduating in 1924. She immigrated to the United States two years later and became a screenwriter in Hollywood. During the late 1930s, she began developing her philosophy of Objectivism, a worldview proclaiming support for each individual’s talent and effort that according to her opinion finds his or her best expression solely within a pure Capitalist framework. Rand argued in favor of her viewpoint in a number of novels, among them “The Fountainhead”, published in 1943, and “Atlas Shrugged” released in 1957. She further elaborated her views in a number of non-fiction works as well as in two journals under her editorship: “The Objectivist” (1962-1971) and “The Ayn Rand Letter” (1971-1976).

Tom Cruise, Ayn Rand, and the Self-Made Man

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Today’s Sydney Morning Herald contains this interesting ramble by Ruth Wajnryb about the power of remaking oneself in one’s own image:

[Tom] Cruise wasn’t always going to be Cruise. He used to be a gawky, orthodontically challenged, two-bit nobody. Then he had his teeth fixed, and who knows what else, and emerged looking as close as he could dream to being a latter-day James Dean in Top Gun. Then he was A Few Good Men’s hunk – the white-uniformed fledgling lawyer-officer with God on his side, a baseball bat in his hand and Demi Moore beside him.
Call me weird, but I actually carry around in my day-planner a very old picture of Tom Cruise – and I mean old. Before Nicole, before Top Gun, before the radical teeth work. It’s a before-pic, to which I’ve attached an after-pic; together they serve as a kind of talis(wo)man. They keep me grounded, reminding me that what we know of Cruise has been commodified to within an inch of his life. Grumpy old woman that I’m becoming, that’s nice to know. It is, well, settling.

And:

Yet face work and air-brushing only go so far. It’s really in the language that Cruise constructs his persona. He talks the talk masterfully. He’s the expert. A major part of talking the talk is massaging past biography into a version that’s congruent with the present. I read somewhere that Cruise said that when he was young he used to look about in the street for people he might help – little old ladies struggling to cross the road, others laden with heavy shopping.
Now hold this boy scout image against the code of the Samurai, which he will passionately explicate for anyone who asks, obligingly allowing his on-screen identity to bleed into him: “Be acutely honest throughout your dealings with all people. Believe in justice … To the true Samurai, there are no shades of grey. There’s only right and wrong. A life of honour, a life of honesty. These are things, the way I try to live my life. Doing things right, and treating people with respect.”

The ending:

My pictorial talisman started out quite personally – used to be something to glance at while waiting at the periodontist. Then I started showing the pictures to people and discovered their reaction gave me a buzz. Some, like me, were astounded at what cosmetic work can do for a face. But most have bought the Cruise line – dazzling success can be anyone’s, provided you really want it. It’s an Ayn Rand world: the rugged individual is born, has hopes and dreams, is single-mindedly ambitious, but also kind to old people, children and animals. All Cruise has done is embrace enthusiastically the pursuit of happiness that is everyone’s right.
Narro ergo sum. Loosely, I am my narrative.

See the full story for a bit more background.

Robert Garmong on Privatizing Space Exploration

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The American Daily has published a new op-ed by Robert Garmong titled “Privatize Space Exploration.” It begins:

As NASA scrambles to make the July 31 window for the troubled launch of space shuttle Discovery, we should recall the first privately funded manned spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, which over a year ago shattered more than the boundary of outer space: it destroyed forever the myth that space exploration can only be done by the government.
Two years ago, a Bush Administration panel on space exploration recommended that NASA increase the role of private contractors in the push to permanently settle the moon and eventually explore Mars. Unfortunately, it appears unlikely that NASA will consider the true free-market solution for America’s expensive space program: complete privatization.
There is a contradiction at the heart of the space program: space exploration, as the grandest of man’s technological advancements, requires the kind of bold innovation possible only to minds left free to pursue the best of their creative thinking and judgment. Yet, by funding the space program through taxation, we necessarily place it at the mercy of bureaucratic whim. The results are written all over the past twenty years of NASA’s history: the space program is a political animal, marked by shifting, inconsistent, and ill-defined goals.

See the full article for more information.
UPDATE: On a related note, Instapundit points us to this optimistic article in the Christian Science Monitor: “Beyond NASA: The Push to Privatize Space Flight.”

Fountainhead Fan: Wedding Crasher Vince Vaughn

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Vince VaughnA brief article in the Chicago Tribune reports that actor Vince Vaughn‘s favorite book is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
Vaughn co-stars in the new movie Wedding Crashers, due out in theaters tomorrow, July 15th.
From the Trib article:

The actor, who grew up in Lake Forest and recently moved to Chicago, was asked to name some favorites by InStyle magazine. He says his favorite book is “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand and his favorite film that he was in is “Swingers.” He won’t reveal his favorite government leader, though.
“I keep my politics to myself–I am just an actor making movies.”

Heh. Nice quality in an actor.
Vaughn also played Mr. Smith’s best friend (the guy who still lives with his mother) in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
UPDATE: Wedding Crashers earns a good review from Roger Friedman over at FoxNews. Excerpts:

David Dobkin’s “Wedding Crashers,” a comedy from New Line, looks like it’s a big, freakin’ comedy hit.
It’s also rated R because it’s a little raunchy and very politically incorrect.
Nevertheless, Dobkin gets the best performances to date out of Vince Vaughn ? for whom this could be a breakout role ? and Owen Wilson. Luckily, he had a good script by Steve Faber and Bob Fisherto work with.
Vince took it in stride when I mentioned that he stole the movie, which isn’t an easy thing to do when Owen Wilson is around.
In between the riotously funny R-rated scenes, there are some nice character touches that give “Crashers” unexpected texture. It’s a perfect summer date movie.

UPDATE: Johnathan Pearce (writing for Samizdata.net) calls Wedding Crashers “two of the funniest hours [I’ve] spent at cinema in quite a while” and “an outrageous, politically incorrect, deplorable romp of a movie, the perfect tonic for these unpleasant times.”

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